Is anyone ever "hacking" anything at a hackathon these days?

Seems more like "building 40% of a CRUD app really fast!"

(but maybe I'm seeing the wrong hackathons)

Sometimes isn't even building it but having a great speaker to pitch your idea

You ain't hacking. They just like using the lingo that's down with da kidz, yo.

It can come close to the original meaning of hacking and hack. Before it became a term for digital breaking and entering.

It used to be about being really knowledgeable and beans able to use something in a clever way like it wasn't intended.
For instance NAT can be considered a hack. Ports where designed to connect to many applications on a single IP. With NAT ports used to route traffic to many (internal) IP addresses. This is an awesome hack. The term hacky though is always negative and implies bad/dirty solution or workaround.

@raze That's why we always had 2 parts comitee. Public part judging the presentation and the idea, and unannounced technical, checking team repos and implementation periodically and assigning own marks.

When a team aced a presentation, but lacked even a basic ducktaped prototype, the loss of votes from technical judges dragged them down sufficiently.

Implementing D2.1 voting system, which allows for negative points helps too.